Welcome to the UK, happy land where consumer electronics cost more than almost anywhere else. It's been a feature of computers and tech that the price of an item in teh UK will not so much reflect the current GBP/USD exchange rate, as be a direct pound for dollar exchange. You pay $99 in the US, we pay £99 in the UK. So far so rippy.
Now that we are all used to this stage of affairs companies have started loading the UK price on top of this, citing exchange fluctuations and other excuses. it's a fact of life. Here are some examples, taken from one of the worst offenders, Apple that illustrate the point. Exchange rates as of today (24th July 2009 are in brackets)
iPod touch 8GB - $229 (£139) UK price £165
Mac Mini 2.0 - $599 (£364) UK price £499
MacBook - $799 (£485) UK price £749
You see how it goes. However even this sort of free cash looks small compared to the price gulf we in the UK face when looking at the new iPhones.
The iPhone 3G is now available in the US for $99. Pretty cool yes. That's a £ price of 60. Who wouldn't want one at that price. Apple would clean up. Except, here in the UK we don't pay £60. We don't even pay double the equivalent price in pounds. We don't even pay TRIPLE!! We pay £342.50 a massive hike over the US price. The 3GS fares little better, US iPhone fans pay $199 for their new phones, that's £121 british pounds. I suppose we should be thankful that we only have to pay just under 3 times this for our phones.
The current 3G is obviously just an excersie in stock clearnace and will probably not be with us for too much longer (certainly in the US). However in the UK it may be some time before Apple clear these, certainly while they insist on fleecing their UK customers to such an unforgivable extent.
Thursday 25 June 2009
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